Data Downloads

Due to the federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) MSDE is prohibited
from releasing individually identifiable information to the public
(http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011603).
Because of this requirement we had to remove all of our archived websites prior
to 2011 because in some cases it was possible to identify individual students. FERPA
protects their right to privacy. We applied certain suppression rules to our website
beginning in 2011 to meet the FERPA requirements.

Information about Zipped Data Files

The zipped files are compressed files that must be expanded using a decompression
tool, which are built in to most modern operating systems. The zip contains a single
file. This file contains column names and Data.

The files are large because they reflect information for 1600+ schools in Maryland.
To ease the use of these large files for “serious number crunchers,”
the data is stored in CSV (comma separated values) format. The CSV format has commas
as delimiters.

The files contain thousands of data rows. Use care when importing the data into
spreadsheet or database programs. It is possible to import this data into Excel,
FoxPro, Access, and many other programs.